Tokyo RPG Factory

» see tokyorpgfactory.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Japan's Official Gazette published a merger notice on 31 January 2024 stating that Square Enix would take over the rights and obligations of Tokyo RPG Factory, and that Tokyo RPG Factory would be dissolved. The trade site gamebiz picked it up the same morning. No farewell message went up, and nobody who had worked there said anything in public. That is a quiet ending even by the standards of a wholly owned subsidiary.

The studio had been set up in August 2014 under the name Tokyo Dream Factory, taking the name it died with the following year. In gamebiz's account the establishment itself is dated to June 2015, under that later name, so the two records disagree by about ten months. It existed because Yosuke Matsuda, who became president of Square Enix in 2013, wanted something inside the company making games in the register of the 1990s, when Chrono Trigger and the Final Fantasy entries of that decade were being made. Part of the stated motivation was that overseas developers had been having success with homages to exactly those games while the company that originally made them had moved on.

Matsuda built it on a staffing model borrowed from film. By 2017 it had ten regular employees, with freelance guest developers hired per project around them, and staff from other Square Enix departments could volunteer in rather than being posted. Three games came out of that arrangement, starting with I Am Setsuna in 2016 and ending with Oninaki in 2019. Lost Sphear sat between them in 2017. Then nothing for the next four years, and the gazette notice.

~ the chronicle ~

~ setsugekka ~

The games were themed on setsugekka, a classical grouping of seasonal images in Japanese art. Snow went to I Am Setsuna, which is played almost entirely across a white landscape with a soundtrack performed on piano alone. The moon went to Lost Sphear and the flowers to Oninaki.

Of the three, I Am Setsuna is the one that landed. It ran Chrono Trigger's Active Time Battle system and was made on the small budget the studio had been set up to work within, and it was on the shelf for the Nintendo Switch launch in March 2017. That put a deliberately modest game in front of a very large audience at the right moment. Atsushi Hashimoto directed all three titles and Hirotaka Inaba wrote all three, with Takashi Tokita, who had worked on Chrono Trigger itself, advising on the first two battle systems before taking a fuller creative role on the third.

~ the volunteer roster ~

The staffing arrangement is what the studio will be remembered for, and probably why it ran out. A core of ten people with a rotating cast around them is cheap and flexible, and it is also a structure with no bench: no second team can start the next project while the first one finishes, and nothing in the building carries the institutional weight to argue for a fourth game once the third has shipped. Matsuda bypassed Square Enix's own corporate structure to set it up, and the arrangement depended on his continuing to want it.

He stepped down as president in 2023. The merger notice followed within a year. The same report also noted the studio's numbers for the fiscal year to March 2023: a net profit of 56 million yen, up about 27 percent on the year before. That was its third consecutive year in the black. This was not an entity being closed for losing money.

~ what survived ~

All three games are still sold and tokyorpgfactory.com is a NameBright parking page. A studio set up to manufacture a feeling that was already twenty years old was always going to be judged against the memory rather than against its own work. These were small Japanese releases priced for people who had been there the first time, and I was not: the Square catalog of the 1990s was never on a machine in my house.

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